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pull.
    â€œWait, Oren,” said the woman.

CHAPTER 5
    â€œIf you have something to say, you’d better say it damn quick, begging your pardon, ma’am,” Yardlinger advised her.
    He was standing where he had been when the door opened, sideways astraddle the threshold with his right arm extended and the Navy aimed at my head. Behind him and to his right stood the fourth armed man, a slack-skinned gaffer with gray stubble on his chin, bloodhound eyes, and a Colt Peacemaker nearly as long as a carbine held at chest level in both hands.
    â€œI did take a shot at him,” said the woman. “He knocked me down in self-defense.”
    The deposed marshal took his eyes from me for the first time in a while and it felt as if an anvil had been lifted from my neck. He studied her.
    â€œNo offense, but you don’t appear to be someone a man would need much defending from.”

    She fetched her handbag and took out the .32, holding it by its butt between thumb and forefinger, the way my mother used to remove a dead rat from a trap by its tail. She hadn’t held it like that twenty minutes earlier.
    â€œDon’t you men have a saying about these things being the great equalizers?”
    â€œThey say that about the Colt. Different gun. But you made your point.” He held his stance. “If it’s not too much trouble, maybe you’d care to explain why you shot at a federal officer.”
    â€œI caught him searching Bram’s room and thought he was a burglar. I’m afraid I panicked. I was about to shoot again and would have if he hadn’t hit me.”
    The lawman played statue a moment longer, eyes dancing from the woman to me and back again. Then he crooked his arm and let down the hammer on the Colt. “Something about it stinks,” he said. “But I’m just the joker in this hand.”
    â€œWhy don’t we haul him in anyhow?” Earl hadn’t lowered his weapon. “Could be he’s wanted somewhere.”
    Yardlinger holstered his gun. “Earl, if we locked up everyone in this town who could be wanted somewhere, we wouldn’t have cell space for those that are. Put up that toy pistol before you put a hole in United States property. Randy? Major?”
    The rawboned deputy lowered the shotgun, followed by the old man, who replaced the Peacemaker’s hammer and thrust the gun into his belt. Earl was last to comply. I kept my hand on the Army Colt until Colleen Bower had returned the little Smith to
her bag and drawn the string. A disappointed sigh swept through the crowd in the hallway. Yardlinger ordered them to disperse. They obeyed reluctantly and he stepped the rest of the way inside and kicked the door shut.
    â€œAnything else?” he asked the woman.
    She shook her head. “Marshal Murdock was about to return some property to me when you came in. I’ll just take it and be on my way.” She held out her hand for the jewelry case.
    â€œIf that’s a box full of pretties, we’ll hold onto it for now,” said Yardlinger.
    â€œYou knew about them?” She took an involuntary step backward.
    â€œI found them in that chest of drawers when I came to pick up Bram’s clothes for Mrs. Arno. Murdock?”
    I gave him the box. “If there’s a safe in the office, lock them up. We’ll hold them for ten days. If no one claims them in that time we’ll return them to the lady.”
    â€œWho the hell are you to give orders?” demanded Earl.
    I stepped to the door and opened it. “Miss Bower?”
    She tilted her chin haughtily, picked up her skirts, and swept out into the now-deserted hallway. Men keep making and buying better firearms, but women have all the weapons. When she was clear of the threshold I closed the door and in the same movement swung around and belted Earl on the chin with the fist I’d used to silence the woman earlier.

    He was husky so I put everything I had into